Successful Living in this Machine Age

Abstract

TO the scientific worker, one of the most interesting features of Mr. Filene's book is that in it a prominent business man has given us essentially an extended version of Prof. Miles Walker's address to Section G (Engineering) of the British Association meeting at York. Mr. Filene ranges over pretty well the whole gamut of human life and interest; and not merely on industry, politics, unemployment, tariffs or world peace but also on art, religion, education, etc., he writes with an originality which provokes criticism and stimulates thought. He has grasped the essential fact that applied science through the advent of power production has created a new industrial and social order—the machine age—and our present distresses and difficulties are largely to be attributed to our imperfect and halting adjustment, individually and collectively, to the demands of the new order. Like Mr. Henry Ford, he sees unemployment and poverty as conditions which are unnecessary and can be abolished by wisely directed effort.

Successful Living in this Machine Age.

By Edward A. Filene, in collaboration with Charles W. Wood. Pp. 350. (London and Toronto: Jonathan Cape, Ltd., 1932.)